With personal computers, mobile devices, television and the Internet, today's informed customers demand instant access to up-to-date information. Nowhere is this truer than in the financial services industry. In dramatic contrast to what it was even just a few years ago, bank customers today require access to their bank accounts and portfolio from a wide range of devices and access methods and demand that such access methods be available and the information contained therein be updated up to the minute. By logging into a bank's website, an account holder may determine how much he or she has charged on his or her credit cards, download account statements, track net-worth, transfer funds between accounts, and perform other functions.
While this allows the account holders to determine the status of their accounts, such methods of information update are unilateral in nature. Apart from monthly financial statements that may be provided by a bank, account holders must otherwise take it upon themselves to stay updated on the recent events and transactions on each of his or her accounts by manually accessing the bank's Internet website portals, logging into each account and authenticating his or her identity. There are many disadvantages to such an approach including diminished financial security. By its natural burdensome nature, requiring a customer to log in and to access his or her accounts increases financial risks and vulnerability to all parties involved as customers are less likely to be aware of and receive notice of fraudulent and mistaken transactions and are less likely to identify these transactions as such, thereby increasing costs to not only the customers but also the financial institution.
Apart from these fraudulent transactions, customers and banks also incur other costs. Customers may miss credit card, mortgage and other payment deadlines, incurring late fees, processing fees and interest fees simply because they forget such deadlines exist or simply have not recently logged into their accounts.
Just as important, the unilateral approach decreases customer awareness in their individual financial health along with the banks' financial resources. Customers are less likely to have contact with the banks and are less likely to take advantage of additional features that a bank may provide to customers, such as specialized bank accounts, increased lines of credits and unique promotions.
Recently, financial institutions have attempted to overcome some of these deficiencies by the use of alerts, which provide notifications to customers for various reasons. For example, alerts may be provided for payments due or for account activities. However, the current implementations of alerts are limited and offer minimal benefits to the customer and to the financial institution. Account holders of the presently known systems have little input regarding the type, timing, and method of delivery for such alerts. Instead, it is the computer system of the financial institution that determines what alerts are sent. But even then, these systems provide alerts in simplistic and static fashion.
As a result, one difficulty with the existing systems is that they fail to take into consideration the customer's account conditions and history. The current systems utilize basic—and often elementary—methods in determining when an alert should be sent. For example, the systems will simply send an alert via a default setting—e.g., telephone voicemail—when a payment is received for an account, without considering whether the method, timing, and type of alert provided will effectively reach the customer in an optimal manner and time frame for the customer to properly respond. Even if a customer actually receives and reads an alert of suspicious activities on a checking account, he or she may ignore the alert because the message was delivered inconveniently during the morning rush hour and through a text message. Similarly, an alert delivered by a bank may not reach customer in a timely fashion because it was delivered through an automated voice message at the customer's home answering machine while the customer is away during the holidays.
The existing systems also do not act beyond their initial delivery of an alert and do not react to customer responses (or the lack of customer responses). Instead, the systems employ a send-and-forget method of alert delivery. In other words, the systems do not take into consideration that whether the customer actually received the alerts it provides. Once an alert is sent, the current systems assume that the customer has or will receive the alert and make no attempt to ensure that notice was actually provided in a reasonable manner, but instead, simply shift the burden to the customers to find the alert. Given their already suboptimal delivery of alerts in the first place, this flaw serves only to compound the problems of the current systems, making it even less likely that a customer would garner any benefit from alerts of the current implementations. As a result, alerts are not always particularly useful to account holders of these financial institutions despite these attempts.
Accordingly, there is an important need for an improved method and system for dynamically providing alerts to a customer through one or more optimal channels at an optimal time, taking into consideration at least the user preferences and usage patterns of the customers. The solution should not only optimally provide alerts to the customers but also ensure that such alerts provide proper notice to customers.